I have a few lubes I use for model trains, one's a sorta heavy one called Labelle 102 and the other is a thinner one, I think it's Labelle 107. You probably want the thinner one. However, if it's sticking because of the wrong lube it'd be good to clean off all the old lube before applying new. For a hard drive, though, that might not really be possible. I'm sure someone could recommend a solvent that would remove the oil and let you apply new, but I don't know where to find that guy.
You need to run park before you shut down, just in case you decide to move the machine. All park does is move the heads off the platter so a vibration doesn't cause a crash. Modern hard drives use the inertia of the spinning disk to do that.
I have two 5151 monitors. One for each XT. I'm definitely not using the right lube. It's just some generic stuff which is probably causing some gumming up like you said. I actually have a copy of the park program. (It was on the MFM drive since forever.) Parking the MFM would probably be a good idea.... more
Just like car oils, there's different grades- Puckdropper,Tue Sep 05 2023 4:50pm
It's called 'Tri-Flow Superior Lubricant'. I've used on my laptop fan as well that has a bearing going south. Worked really well. After two applications, it hasn't grinded since. It would be nice if I could remove the old oil from the 1980s + my additions before putting more on... I'm just not sure... more
Sometimes you want something pretty thin, especially for getting in to things. (That's something that WD-40 is really good at. It's just not good at staying there and lubricating.)
Almost has the consistency of gasoline.. smells terrible too. The 'PTFE' in the label is basically teflon. I looked up the wikipedia page and it looks like PTFE is also used in bearings so I guess it's the right stuff? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene My guess is that it's probably... more